Get High at Work!

Tag: blogging

  • Four Upcoming Speaking Events @ GA Atlanta

    My speaking & teaching calendar for April and May just got a little busier, thanks to the great folks at General Assembly. If you haven’t visited their sweet new space at Ponce City Market, you should do yourself a favor and head to midtown Atlanta and have a look.

    While you’re there, you can get some learning in, too. Here are the workshops I’m leading in April & May at GA Atlanta.

    • Wednesday April 15 – Advanced Social Media Strategies – Step by step, we’ll dig into how best to engage your target audience on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media channels through best practices and some little-known but powerful personal tactics.
    • Wednesday April 29 – How to Measure Social Media ROI – You know social media is powerful, but now that it’s become part of your marketing mix, you have to measure its ROI. How do you do that? Join me for this hands on workshop and leave knowing how to measure the fiscal effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
    • Saturday May 2 – Digital Marketing Bootcamp – the entire 10 weeks of Digital Marketing in one day! Bring your PC and something to write on, because you’re going to need them both as we cover branding, analytics, social, content, the marketing funnel, and your marketing calendar in a blazing fast half day.
    • Saturday May 16 – Blogging for Your Brand Bootcamp – Come with your PC and leave with a fully functioning WordPress Blog, including a custom domain, vital plugins, a great theme, social media connection, a content strategy, and your first three blog posts.

    There are certain skills everyone needs to thrive in today’s digital marketplace, and GA is covering them all. I’m excited to help new marketers and bloggers dive in headfirst and learn skills that they’ll actually be doing in the workshops and then take home to their businesses the next day.

  • Why You Must Blog If You’re Running A Startup

    I’m in the content marketing business, so that’s generally the subject that ensues when someone asks me what I’m up to these days. When someone asks me what that means, I break it down into two parts: I create content strategy and I create content.

    What kind of content? Blogs. Those who understand the value of content marketing have no more questions. Those who do not (yet) understand the value of content marketing continue asking, mainly to determine how (and why!) one might make a living creating content (aka writing blogs) for other people.

    After a few minutes of explanation, the conversation usually ends up in the same place, which is what Mark Suster has said any number of times: if you’re a startup, you must blog. I could quote Suster’s Techcrunch article over and over and over, and I highly recommend that anyone considering a startup just bookmark it, and refer to it anytime you wonder why you’re trying to create prose when you’re not creating product. So go there and read it, and heed the advice of one of the most respected tech marketers on the planet.

    But there are other resources out there who (duh!) agree completely and offer up even more reasons that startup entrepreneurs should blog.

    Still not convinced? That’s ok. You will be, either by trying it and seeing the results for yourself, or seeing one or more of your competitors winning through inbound marketing strategies, the simplest of which is starting, growing, and maintaining and active blog.

    Suster repeats what I’ve heard so many times: “I’d like to blog, but I don’t really know what to talk about.” Don’t make it harder than it is. You know enough about something to start a business, right? Then you know enough to blog about that thing you’re building for that space you’re building it for and that problem you’re solving.

    That’s what you blog about. To quote Suster again, and wrap this thing up, “If you write about something for which you’re both knowledgeable and passionate, I’ll bet you can pump out more than you think.“

    Start your startup’s blog. Today.

  • Blogging for your Brand 2

    Tonight General Assembly hosted the second session of “Blogging for your Brand” at their new facility in Ponce City Market. This session was different from the first session back in January for several reasons:

    • New GA Facility
    • Paid ($10) vs. Free Event
    • Second Time Around

    So it was different, but very good. The staff and facility at GA Atlanta are both top notch, and everything went as smooth as it could possibly go. What I liked best about tonight’s session of this 2-hour workshop were the group’s new questions and the new perspectives that those questions brought to me and the rest of the group.

    For example, one of the questions was directed at me and the business behind Atlanta Tech Blogs: “How do you create a content strategy and branded content for someone you don’t even know?”  Great question, and the answer started with the fact that I get to know their brand first, then their audience, and then I can begin to create a strategy and original content based on their brand.

    Another great question was about frequency of blogging. There’s no standard for how often you should blog. David Cummings’ posts arrive between 9pm and 10pm every night, whereas John Saddington has several posts spread throughout the day, and Salesloft adds content to their blog 2-3 times each week. There’s no standard. Your frequency is up to you. The more important idea is consistency: whatever the frequency, be consistent.

    Also, an attendee asked about engaging with social media influencers, and whether or not one should engage those influencers using their personal twitter handle or the company’s twitter handle. Again, there’s no rule; however, that decision should stem from the company’s brand and culture, which drive social media engagement methods and boundaries, and ultimately drive the content that the company produces and shares.

    One of the longer discussions we had tonight was about branding, and how content itself as well as content strategy must come after branding. Branding determines your content voice, your content audience, your words, and your values. Those things make up content, so you should make branding decisions before you engage in a content marketing strategy.

    Thanks to everyone who attended, and to GA Atlanta for hosting. I look forward to leading this workshop again soon. Next Thursday, I’ll be leading a new workshop called “Pitch Camp“, which will be based on Pitch Practice, but focus far more on the mechanics of the pitch rather than having everyone stand up in front  of the room and deliver a pitch in exchange for feedback. I hope you can join me at this event next Thursday from 11am-1pm.

  • Upcoming Speaking Events

    Next week and the following week, I’m giving two talks at General Assembly’s newly opened campus at Ponce City Market. They have a fantastic new space in the renovated old building that’s prime for small and large group gatherings, and I’m excited to do these two talks in those new digs.

    First, this coming Wednesday, March 18th, from 6:30-8:30pm, I’ll be leading “Blogging for your Brand.” I gave this same talk back in January at GA’s old temporary space next to Dancing Goats. The crux of the talk is that everyone should be blogging and that anyone can create and maintain a useful, active blog for themselves or their company. Here’s the outline for the two-hour event.

    • Platforms – Blogger, WordPress, Medium, etc.
    • Starting – Most people’s biggest hurdle.
    • Writing – “I don’t even know what I’d write about!”
    • Best practices – How to make it count.
    • Promotion – You have to tell someone or nobody will know.
    • Measuring – Yup, Google Analytics.
    • Success stories – Be a millionaire! Or something.

    The following week, as part of General Assembly Atlanta’s “Launch Week”, I’ll be doing a similar talk to the one I gave at ROAM Dunwoody last fall called “Pitch Camp.” Pitch Camp will be on Thursday March 26, from 11am-1pm. For those two hours, I’ll be doing a much expanded version of the intro I give at every session of Pitch Practice, going deeper into how to craft and master your best pitch. Here’s how it’ll run.

    • Why everyone should learn to pitch
    • The anatomy of each type of pitch
    • 30 second elevator pitch
    • 3 minute pitch
    • 5-6 minute investor deck

    I hope you’ll join me for one (or both!) of these events. As always, both events will be full of learning, fun, and laughter. Both events are just $10 to attend.

  • Google Analytics for Bloggers

    We’re halfway through the Digital Marketing class here at General Assembly. One of the biggest challenges in the class is tackling Google Analytics, which is a big, hairy, complex beast of a tool that can either overwhelm you or totally guide you.

    If you are or aspire to be a digital marketer, then you must embrace the beast that is Google Analytics, and learn how to use it, piece by piece. Why? Because if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it, and measuring your web site and marketing metrics is the foundation of digital marketing.

    To get over the first big hump that greets most beginner bloggers, I wrote a series of posts for GA on connecting your blog to Google Analytics.

    1. How to setup a Google Analytics account – It’s not difficult, but not nearly as easy as getting a GMail account.
    2. How to connect your Blogger account to Google Analytics – You’d think that, since Google owns Blogger, Analytics would be automatic, but you’d be wrong. Blogger has its own “Stats” package, but the numbers are always different from Analytics.
    3. How to connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics – Manually or with a plugin, and I highly recommend the plugin method. Dirt simple.
    4. How to connect your Tumblr blog to Google Analytics – This one’s the easiest by far. A few navigational clicks and copy/paste.

    I was also planning to write a similar post on connecting Medium to Google Analytics, but it would have been a very short post, because you just can’t. I talked to the folks at Medium, and they said they were working on a couple of things in that realm.

    1. Using Medium to blog on a custom domain, instead of medium.com/@yourname
    2. Building their own analytics tools to compete with Google Analytics

    You kinda have to take what the folks at Medium say pretty seriously. One of the founders of Medium was a founder of Blogger before Google acquired Blogger, and then that same guy went on to build a little company called Twitter. You know him better as @ev.

  • 10rocket’s Blog Challenge

    I’ve known Chris Turner, the founder of 10Rocket since early last year, when he and I met at Tech Talent South. Shortly after that, Chris enrolled in The Iron Yard‘s Ruby on Rails software developer course, because he wanted to be able to build the software product that he had envisioned. A few months later, Chris showed up at Pitch Practice and started working on his pitch for what is now 10Rocket.

    Since then, 10Rocket has rocketed to some serious success as Chris refined his pitch to what it is now:

    We build MVP web apps for startups in 2 weeks for $5k.

    Boom. Well, last time Chris showed off his pitch at Pitch Practice, I reminded him that 10Rocket needs to start telling its story via a blog. They came out swinging today on Medium. Chris is right: most blog posts teach you something or make a list or tell you “How to” this or that, but few posts cause you to do something. 10Rocket’s first blog post challenged its readers to write a haiku about their startup. Brilliant!

    To take it even further, 10Rocket wrote a haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs in this tweet.

    Not bad! And the challenge caused me to write my own haiku about Atlanta Tech Blogs:

    Atlanta Tech Blogs
    We help you tell a story
    Everyone can hear

    Which do you like better?  What is your blog challenging your readers to do?

  • 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Bloggers

    A-Conversation-On-Trends-Best-Practices-E-Commerce

    Beyond the obvious (write), there are tactics that you should build into the DNA of your blogging strategy. These are things that should become habitual, so you don’t even have to think about doing each of them. These are blogging habits that you see in the most successful blogs, but they are not advertised as “Here’s how you do it right.” But you can do these things. They are not difficult. Rather, they are so simple, that you might overlook them or think that these 7 habits of highly effective bloggers are not all that important— they are.


    1. Be consistent.


    Regardless of how much you blog, you must adopt a rhythm, a cadence, a regular schedule for your posts. As you build your audience, your predictability will add value to your regular readers, who will come to expect your posts at certain times on certain days. Whether you push a long form story out once a week at exactly the same time like The Bitter Southerner or post every night between 9pm and 10pm like Atlanta tech entrepreneur David Cummings, you should be consistent in order to grow the readership of your blog.

    2. Talk about what you know.

    Tell your  story. That’s why people will follow, read, and share your blog. It’s your blog, so talk about your experiences, the things you know the best, what you personally have learned through this experience or that. You are unique, and so is your point of view on the world. I’m not going to write about cricket or ballet because I have no knowledge of those things. Rather, I write about tech startups and my (good and bad) experiences living through 7 of them.

    3. Tell a story.

    Everyone loves a story, so entice your readers with stories that you’ve lived, seen, or been a part of. The greatest stories always have lessons, and your experiences are no exception. Telling your story, helps you provide your own context for the lessons you’ve learned and are now teaching your readers. When you tell a story, it makes it real for your readers. They can then share your story and the lessons you’ve learned in their own lives.

    4. Use good grammar.

    You knew this article would get uninteresting at some point, didn’t you? Grammar. Every amateur writer’s nemesis. One poorly used comma, apostrophe, or gerund, and you’ve lost a portion of your audience. Fear not! You have two lines of defense against poor grammar. First, read it out loud. Does it sound right? If not, chances are it’s not. But don’t let your voice be the only decider. Grammarly offers a great, simple, free browser plugin that checks everything for proper grammar use.

    5. Include an image.

    The age-old adage “a picture tells a thousand words” is famous for a reason. Adding a beautiful, relevant image to your blog post helps capture the reader’s attention, adds color and beauty to your words, and helps your reader feel like they are part of your story. Also, when you promote your blog in social media, the results of using an image in a Facebook post or Tweet speak for themselves. Hubspot reports that using an image in a Facebook post gets 53% more Likes than a post with no image. Twitter is not shy about its research that adding a photo to a tweet increases engagement by 35%, among other promotional benefits.

    6. Quote outside facts.

    Do you see what I did there? Quoting relevant, authoritative 3rd party facts gives you credibility that you are not just making this stuff up. Do the research so that your readers don’t have to. They can rely on you to give them all the information they need. Nobody knows it all, but everyone knows something, so share other people’s knowledge to earn credibility for your own writing.

    7. Share & engage.

    Sharing is easy and fast with the plethora of social media and email plugins available for any blog. If you want people to read your blog posts, you should share each blog post on the social media channels that your audiences frequently visit. If your audience is on Pinterest, sharing your blog posts on Google+ may not reach them as effectively. Then, once you share, unless you’re writing for you, like Indie Developer and Partner at The Iron Yard John Saddington, you must engage your readers. Reply when they comment or ask a question. Engage in the conversation on your preferred social media channels. Let them know you’re real by accepting comments, corrections, and even criticism.

    It takes 21 days to create a habit of just about anything. Therefore, if you practice each of these 7 things for your blog for 21 straight days, each one will become a habit, and from then on become part of your blogging DNA, helping you become a better, more consistent, and more popular blogger.

  • Learn Something New

    I read a lot of blogs every day. A lot of blogs. Today, one of John Saddington’s four blog posts today (he blogs for himself and for Desk) caught my eye and made me think. John wrote about Roost, a plugin for WordPress that enables Safari users to get push notifications of new posts.

    So what? I use Chrome. Why would I care about Safari users? I’m teaching Digital Marketing at GA, and one of the topics we’re covering is segmenting in Google Analytics. Just for kicks, I checked out the traffic that Atlanta Tech Blogs gets from Safari users, both desktop and mobile. Whaddya know! More than 30% of the visitors to Atlanta Tech Blogs are Safari users. That ranks second only to Chrome users. Who knew?

    So I had to eat a bunch of my own dog food as I teach the DGM class, and it was a really good example to show:

    • How our customers/users can be segmented
    • How we can address each segment in a different way
    • That we can offer each segment something of value
    • That we need to practice what we preach :-)
    • That we can all learn something by reading others’ blogs
    • That we are all more likely to make a purchase (or download) when someone we trust recommends it.

    Saddington is about as smart as technologists come, so I trust his advice. Roost was extremely easy to install and get running, so now I can offer my Safari visitors something of value: push notifications.

  • Normal is just a setting on the dryer

    We’re in session 3 of Digital Marketing at General Assembly, and the word “normal” has popped up in our discussions of analytics and measurement.  What is normal?

    Some would say “normal is just a setting on the dryer”, but we’re not talking about “life” normal, but marketing analytics normal.  In the DGM world, “normal” is what we would define as our baseline or what we generally expect.  For example, for this blog, I can expect on a day to day basis to get a certain number of users. That’s normal. I can also expect to get a certain percentage of that traffic from the normal sources, as exhibited below in the pizza chart from Google Analytics.

    Yes, I said “pizza chart” because my son said he thinks it looks more like a pizza than a pie, so he wants to call it a pizza chart. Pizza chart it is.  The chart above covers all of January, which is when I reverted back to Blogger from WordPress for this blog. So, this is my new normal, until the trend changes.
    Why do we care about normal?  Here are a few reasons.
    • Normal is my baseline. It’s what you can expect if nothing else changes.
    • Knowing normal, now I can manage traffic sources by exception, meaning that, whenever I see a spike or dip in any of the above percentages, I know to check it out.
    • Anything outside of normal is either good or bad. A spike can mean a popular post or a new social medial influencer shared a post. A dip might mean a domain, DNS, or bad link shared.

    Just like when you start monitoring any aspect of your health – weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc. – you first establish a baseline. Then you manage by the changes to that baseline, either good or bad.
    So, while normal is a setting on the dryer, it’s a very important setting in the health and growth of your web property.  Find your normal, and measure against it.

  • How to Generate New Ideas For Your Blog

    Essentials-of-blogging-and-content-strategy

    One of the most frustrating things about blogging – or writing in general – is coming up with new and fresh topics. You may call it “writer’s block,” and everyone who is even somewhat engaged in creating written content has run into writer’s block at least once.

    Well, no more for those of us who blog for our brand! Here are a dozen different ways to help you establish regular topics that you can count on for keeping your blog fresh, relevant, and compelling to your readers.

    For more on starting a blog for your brand, check out the first post from this series.

    1. Remember why you’re blogging.

    Often, taking things back to their most simple form can help regenerate the original purpose of starting a blog in the first place. When all else fails, refer to your original goals for your blog, and start there.


    2. Remember for whom you are writing.

    Always, always, always try to empathize with your audience, your readers, those who are interacting with your brand. What are they saying? You may find that a reader comment is easily translated into a full blog post.


    3. What does your audience need to know?

    Consider everything your company is doing right now – all the projects everyone is working on or just completed. Now ask yourself, what do our customers, users, channel, or fans need to know? Tell them!


    4. Read other blogs.

    For inspiration for content, style, topics, and ideas. Following blogs in your market space also helps you keep tabs your competitors, customers, and the market itself.


    5. Every company event is a blog post.

    What is your company doing in your community? There’s no better way to gain genuine goodwill and press than organizing a company outreach into your community.


    6. Every company success is a blog post.

    Every success should be touted from the rooftops as well as the company blog. Did your company raise some money, win a new customer (get permission), do well in a market survey, win an award?  Every company success should be a blog post.


    7. Every new product should be several blog posts.

    The beauty of the 300-500 word SEO optimization is that you can stretch your content over a series of blog posts.


    8. Every new feature is a blog post

    Not only because it’s a new feature, but because it’s an opportunity for you to teach your users and/or customers how to use the new feature and why the feature was added.


    9. Every company team member is a blog post.

    Sometimes, when a team member leaves, it’s a blog post, too, as you fondly remember the team member’s contributions and wish them well in their new adventure.


    10. Company news is a no brainer.

    Some of the above points may also serve as “news”, but actual news that used to be traditionally shared in a press release should be on the blog immediately after the press release, or, some might argue, instead of the press release.


    11. Company history

    Detailing your company’s history is a great way to share your humble beginnings, your culture, your team, and generally why your users and customers have stuck with you for all this time.


    12. Teach your audience how to use your products

    This is a great way to maintain a long series of blog posts, and using video and great images really adds to these posts. Also, your sales and support teams can (and should) refer to these posts for their direct contact with customers.


    13. Have your support team answer the most frequently asked questions.

    Answering FAQs is a great way to address your customer’s needs, and for your team members to shine in their deep technical knowledge of your offering or the dynamics of your market.

    That’s a baker’s dozen ways for you to avoid blogger block, and keep your blog’s content new, fresh, compelling, and relevant to your company culture and your audience.

    Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and veteran of 7 tech startups. He runs Atlanta Tech Blogs, Pitch Practice, mentors startups and entrepreneurs at ATDC, and teaches Digital Marketing courses at GA.